At the Center

I just finished the third chapter of Ong, and I thought that I would right about my thoughts on it especially about the end of the chapter where he discusses the perceptions that change from an oral based culture to a written one. Ong believes that, since sound is something that is constantly coming at us from all directions, it gives us the perception of being the center of the world around us. Since we cannot see any differently, this must be the case, adn so we are under the impression, for thousands of years, that we are in fact the center of all that is. However, once literature is created, once we become a literate culture and learn to read and write, then the world changes from one centered around ourselves to simply a world that must be explored and whose limits must be found. Withought the technology of maps, brought on by the invention of the written word, at least in Ong's view, there is no rest of the world to discover or explore. We are the important part of the world, so let the rest of it find us.